Posts Tagged phone

Wandering though life, I often encounter the occasional person who seems to have missed an etiquette class. Or several. In particular, I have noticed that a very large number of gaffes occur during face to face conversation. So as a gift, I provide the following guide to using your cellphone when in conversation with family, friends, co-workers, and friendly companions:

Rule #1: Don’t.

Rule #2: See Rule #1

If your phone rings, vibrates or plays an obnoxious ringtone (all ringtones are obnoxious) there is only one polite action: Turn it off or mute it, while apologizing: “I’m sorry, I forgot to turn my phone off. Fixed!” Slip it back in your pocket and deal with it later.

Wandering though life, I often encounter the occasional person who seems to have missed an etiquette class. Or several. In particular, I have noticed that a very large number of gaffes occur at the dinner table. So as a gift, I provide the following guide to using your cellphone when sharing dinner with family, friends, and friendly companions:

Rule #1: Don’t.

Rule #2: See Rule #1

If your phone rings, vibrates or plays an obnoxious ringtone (all ringtones are obnoxious) there is only one polite action: Turn it off or mute it, while apologizing: “I’m sorry, I forgot to turn my phone off. Fixed!” Slip it back in your pocket and deal with it later.

In an upcoming post, I will cover cellphone use during conversation with another person. I’m sure you all look forward to that.

We’ve got a Droid and a couple of older not-that-smart phones on our 3-way Verizon plan. The Droid is relatively new, and we’ve all been interested in it; Deb (she’s the one with the Droid) just loves the thing. After we’d all had time to look it over and consider our options, we decided we were all interested in owning one. So we called Verizon, and they described a “two for one” price offer, where you end up paying about $200 “for two phones” (I realize these are subsidized, this is simply how they describe it), along with an increase of $20/month on each of the other two phones ($40/month increase in total) for the “unlimited data plan”, as compared to the more modest data plans we already had on those phones.

We thanked them, waited for person #3 (eldest son, Brian) to become available, and explained the terms. He liked the idea, so we called them back about 20 minutes after the original call to “do the deal.” Things didn’t go well.Read the rest of this entry »

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.